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For example, in Dutch and Turkish, unergative verbs can be used in impersonal passive constructions, but unaccusative verbs cannot. [11] In the following example from Dutch, the verb is unergative, describing a voluntary action, and can be made passive: Er wordt hier veel geskied. "A lot of skiing is done here." (lit. "it is skied much here")
A few verbs are of both types at once, like read: compare I read, I read a magazine, and this magazine reads easily. Some languages like Japanese have different forms of certain verbs to show transitivity. For example, there are two forms of the verb "to start": (7) 会議が始まる。 (Kaigi ga hajimaru., "The meeting starts.")
Certain non-syntactic aspects are common to all action verbs. Actions may be either planned or unplanned. The planning aspect is partially reflected in syntax by the agent or actor roles. An animate agent is a planner who instigates an action. The actors of intransitive verbs such as ’walk’, or ’sit’ are also planners.
Note that forms of the verb be are included regardless of whether or not they function as auxiliaries in the sense of governing another verb form. (For exceptions to this restriction, see § Inversion with other types of verb below.) A typical example of subject–auxiliary inversion is: a. Sam has read the paper. – Statement b. Has Sam read ...
An unergative verb is an intransitive verb [1] that is characterized semantically by having a subject argument which is an agent that actively initiates the action expressed by the verb. For example, in English, talk and resign in the sentence "You talk and you resign" are unergative verbs, since they are intransitive (one does not say "you ...
The verb form is formally called volitive, [3] [4] but in practice, it can be seen as a broader deontic form, rather than a pure volitive form, since it is also used to express orders and commands besides wishes and desires. Examples: Venu. ― "Come." (a request or command) Donu ĝin al mi. ― "Give it to me." (a request or command) Ni faru tion.
In linguistic typology, active–stative alignment (also split intransitive alignment or semantic alignment) is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the sole argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause (often symbolized as S) is sometimes marked in the same way as an agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject such as "I" or "she" in English) but other times in the same way ...
In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. [1] [2] As its name suggests, the habitual aspect (abbreviated HAB), not to be confused with iterative aspect or frequentative aspect, specifies an action as occurring habitually: the subject performs the action usually, ordinarily, or customarily.